Pierluigi Ciambra - Lullaby and Last Goodbye
Lullaby and last goodbye is an autobiographical photo book that, through the use of archive and original images, deals with the themes of mourning, the reworking of mourning through photographic research and the relationship between fathers and sons. As I look at the photographs taken by my father and revisit the places of my childhood hidden in my memory, I regain awareness of my relationship with my parents, our life and how my childhood was not as glossy and limpid as the one described in them, but full of cracks. When my daughters were born, I turned my focus to my family and understood my father's desire, indeed his need, to preserve the memory of those moments, to make them live forever. So I started photographing them daily, rediscovering with them the magical purity of childhood. Little girls grow up, discovering a world untouched in their eyes, and they do so with the freedom of those who unravel huge mysteries without schemes and conjectures, with the instinctive ingenuity of childlike curiosity, drawing you into their fairy-tale reality. Thanks to them, my gaze deepens and changes. It becomes a mirror of the soul and, by listening to the other, is transformed. Photography becomes a medium that allows me to enter their world, explore it, know it and crystallize it, recalling my childhood and allowing me to fill absence and exorcise death. Telling their view of the world and, at the same time, laying bare my inner quest and the process of reconciliation with my past are the motivations behind this photographic project of mine. Through metaphors and staging, I retrace their steps, observe the magic of childhood and transform their bodies into memories, their existences into eternal, immortal icons. The archive images of my father, the drawings and texts written by the girls and my own photographs are three points of view that intertwine in a non-linear narrative structure that begins with mourning and death and progresses by exorcising doubts and fears through the re-evaluation of personal history and point of view on reality.
